With all due respect for the friend who recommended it to me, I am hard pressed to figure out why The Elegance of the Hedgehog is at the top of the New York Times best-sellers list. I suspect it is one of those books that lots of people buy because it is trendy and then never finish.
But maybe I'm missing something.
The novel is full of the types of maudlin, pseudo-philosophic sentences I would have copied into my diary when I was in high school:
In the split second while I saw the stem and the bud drop to the counter I intuited the essence of Beauty ... Oh my gosh, I thought, does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?
Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea.
I will admit there is a slightly yogic quality to the novel. But it feels so heavy-handed it's hard to enjoy. Narrated by two alternating and supposedly kindred souls, the book is inconsistant, and this lack of integrity of voice makes it tiresome at times -- I felt myself rushing through one narrator to get on to the other.
Of the two narrators, Madame Renee Michel, concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, takes the novel to a higher plane. She, indeed, lives the mindful life amateur yogis aspire to.
But Paloma Joss, the "introspective" 12-year-old, rings false. Her reflections on the inferiority of all those around her are so predictably jaded that its exhausting. Worst of all, her voice appears in a different font -- a pet peeve of mine, and a bit of an insult to the reader, as though the voices are not sufficiently different to make the point of view clear.
Yes, the novel is a meditation on friendship. And perhaps it's simply because I spend so much time in the teen world, as a teacher of middle schoolers, that I found Paloma's voice so tiring. But her narration keeps the very adult portions of the book anchored to a far more narrow view of the world.
But maybe I'm missing something.
The novel is full of the types of maudlin, pseudo-philosophic sentences I would have copied into my diary when I was in high school:
In the split second while I saw the stem and the bud drop to the counter I intuited the essence of Beauty ... Oh my gosh, I thought, does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?
Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea.
I will admit there is a slightly yogic quality to the novel. But it feels so heavy-handed it's hard to enjoy. Narrated by two alternating and supposedly kindred souls, the book is inconsistant, and this lack of integrity of voice makes it tiresome at times -- I felt myself rushing through one narrator to get on to the other.
Of the two narrators, Madame Renee Michel, concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, takes the novel to a higher plane. She, indeed, lives the mindful life amateur yogis aspire to.
But Paloma Joss, the "introspective" 12-year-old, rings false. Her reflections on the inferiority of all those around her are so predictably jaded that its exhausting. Worst of all, her voice appears in a different font -- a pet peeve of mine, and a bit of an insult to the reader, as though the voices are not sufficiently different to make the point of view clear.
Yes, the novel is a meditation on friendship. And perhaps it's simply because I spend so much time in the teen world, as a teacher of middle schoolers, that I found Paloma's voice so tiring. But her narration keeps the very adult portions of the book anchored to a far more narrow view of the world.
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